Anglophone Slaves in Francophone Louisiana

WHILE PRESSURE FROM ABOVE has frequently been alluded to in describing the ascendancy of English in cultural, educational, and commercial contexts in traditionally francophone Louisiana, simultaneous pressure from below has heretofore been all but ignored. This essay examines the evidence for the likely presence of a substantial population of anglophone slaves and ex-slaves exerting considerable pressure from below in the shift from French (and Louisiana creole) to English in the nineteenth century. They lived on plantations such as the ones found along the Cane River (la Rivière des Cannes or la Rivière aux Cannes) in present-day west-central Louisiana (see fig. 1). Serving as a representative microcosm, the situation on the Cane River will provide the main example, but corroborating evidence from other locations in Louisiana suggests the likelihood of a similar scenario wherever plantation society developed in francophone Louisiana. Apart from the question of language shift, this essay will present some of the evidence for earlier language-contact phenomena among francophone, creolophone, and anglophone populations in Louisiana and will conclude with discussion of one likely contact-induced feature (pronominal tags) in regional African American English (AAE).

The Emergence of Creole Plantation Society on La Riviere Des Cannes ¹

The earliest colonization of the Mississippi Delta and the adjacent Gulf Coast was an undertaking of the New French more than of France directly. Biloxi was founded in 1699 and Mobile in 1701 by the French Canadian Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d'Iberville. Another enterprising French Canadian, Louis Antoine Juchereau de St. Denis, left the Mobile colony in 1714 and founded, within the confines of a Natchitoches Indian village on the Cane River, ² a trading post that was destined to become the first permanent nonnative settlement in the Louisiana Purchase. New Orleans (la Nouvelle Orléans) was founded four years later, when the French monarchy began taking a more direct interest in the development of Louisiana.

With the Spanish territorial claim directly to the west and many Native American settlements in the vicinity, le poste des Natchitoches proved to be in an excellent location for trade. In 1716, Fort St. Jean Baptiste was built and St. Denis became its commander. The Spanish countered immediately, building a fort and founding a number of missions in the region. In 1719, just 15 miles west of Natchitoches, the Spanish upgraded their mission to the Los Adaes Indians by building a presidio. In 1729, Los Adaes became the capital of provincial Texas and remained so for 44 years. Although the French and Spanish settlements were officially hostile, in reality they were dependent upon each other for mutual provision and development, and, in fact, marriage alliances were established from the start. ³ Interdependence increased when the Louisiana Territory west of the Mississippi was ceded to Spain in 1763, ending all political barriers to continued economic and social intercourse between the French and Spanish.

The Louisiana Purchase by the Americans in 1803, while creating a new political barrier between American and Spanish territories, reinforced the dynamic of fusion on the Cane River. French and Spanish families, often united by blood, became wealthy in the common creation of a thriving plantation economy along the banks of the Cane River. Based on extensive use of slave labor, cotton production and, to a lesser extent, indigo and tobacco production yielded wealth. As a result European Creole (white Creole) plantation society emerged on the Cane River, in all of its glory and in all of its guilt. In this instance, however, the glory and the guilt belonged not only to white Creoles but also to a sizable population of gens de couleur libres (free Creoles of color), who also frequently became plantation owners and slave owners on the Cane River. There they attained a level of affluence and status unsurpassed for any people of color anywhere in the antebellum South (Mills 1977).

Many Cane River Creoles—regardless of their ethnicity (Mills 1977, xxviii, 183...